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Michael Pollan Offers 64 Ways to Eat Food

By Tara Parker-Pope January 8, 2010 10:12 amJanuary 8, 2010 10:12 am

Author Michael Pollan (Alia Malley).

How did your great grandparents ever figure out what to eat? Long before nutrition scientists began studying food, long before marketers began advertising food and long before the author Michael Pollan started writing about food, people, somehow, managed to eat more healthfully than they do now.

“We know there is a deep reservoir of food wisdom out there, or else humans would not have survived to the extent we have,” Mr. Pollan writes in his new book “Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual” (Penguin). “Much of this food wisdom is worth preserving and reviving and heeding.”

To compile the rules for his book, which total 64, Mr. Pollan says he consulted folklorists, anthropologists, doctors, nurses, nutritionists and dietitians “as well as a large number of mothers and grandmothers.” He solicited rules from his own readers and audiences at conferences and speeches. He also posted a request to readers of the Well blog, who delivered more than 2,500 suggestions.

The result is a useful and funny purse-sized manual that could easily replace all the diet books on your bookshelf.

I love this book not only for its simplicity and practical advice, but because the rules themselves are memorable and will ring in your head long after you read it. Choosing just one rule that is new to you from each of the book’s three sections would certainly lead to meaningful changes in your eating habits.

This week, I spoke with Mr. Pollan about how he compiled “Food Rules,” his favorite submissions and those that made him laugh but didn’t make the cut. Read our conversation below and then please join the discussion.

Q.

What was the impetus for this book?

A.

I’ve spent 10 years looking at agriculture, food and health. I’ve done it mostly as a reporter with a lot of research and adventures and explorations. At the end of the day people want to know what to do with this information. What’s the practical import of what you’ve learned? It’s the question I always get when I’m speaking to readers.

After I published “In Defense of Food,” a polemic about nutrition science and the food industry and how little we know about nutritional science, I heard from doctors who said, “I would love to have a pamphlet I could give to patients.” They didn’t have time to give them a big nutrition lecture. They liked the simple rule concept. They understood you don’t need to know all the science to make smart decisions. I kept hearing the word pamphlet, and I wanted to write a book that would reach as many people as possible. It’s a real radical distillation of everything I’ve been working on. It’s really just to help people to act. It’s about daily practice more than theory.

Q.

On the cover of “In Defense of Food,” you gave us the rule “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Isn’t that one rule enough?

A.

You’ll see it still organizes the book. Those are the three big categories. “Eat food” is devoted to rules that help you distinguish real food from edible food-like substances. There is a section on “Mostly plants,” about making distinctions between foods, meat eating and the kinds of foods to eat. The third section, “Not too much,” is about the manners of eating, the cultural rules that help keep us from overeating, things like “Stop before you’re full,” and “Buy smaller plates and glasses.” It’s the umbrella under which all the other rules fit.

Q.

When you wrote “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants,” did you know it would become such a popular, oft-repeated rule?

A.

I came up with that when I was writing a piece for The New York Times Magazine called “Unhappy Meals,” which became my book. I was trying to simplify everything I learned as radically as possible. I thought that was a compromise. I really wanted to say just “Eat food,” but I realized that wasn’t enough. You had to sort of take a position on meat and vegetables, and you had to address the whole issue of quantity. I’ve learned that from Marion Nestle (the New York University nutrition professor and author), that in the end, so much of the discussion about nutrition is a way to avoid talking about how much people are eating. People would rather talk about anything else than quantity. Eat food was the main message, but I realized I needed to qualify it. I was hoping for two words. I compromised at seven.

The adverb “mostly” has been the most controversial. It makes everybody unhappy. The meat people are really upset I’m taking a swipe at meat eating, and the vegetarians are saying, “What’s with the ‘mostly?’ Why not go all the way?” You can’t please everyone. In a way that little word is the most important. It’s not all or nothing. Mostly. It’s about degree. But in the whole food discussion, I’ve learned the most from that, that little “ly” and people’s reaction to it.

Q.

In compiling the new food rules, was brevity important to you?

A.

Brevity is important, and humor is important. This isn’t a somber book at all. One that came through the Well blog, “Don’t buy cereals that change the color of the milk,” that’s a nice way to get at don’t buy things with strange ingredients, colors and additives. I want rules to be vivid and sticky, easy to remember. I don’t want people to have to carry the book around with them. I was looking for cultural blips that will stick in your head.

Q.

Do we need to embrace all 64 rules? Can we pick and choose?

A.

The reason there are 64, for some people one rule will work better than the other. I think it’s important to take at least one from each category. If you only take from “Eat food” or “Mostly plants,” you’ll get highly processed edible food-like substances out of your cart, but it might not help you deal with the problem of overeating. You need something about eating at tables, eating with other people, all the kind of getting back in touch with your body so you don’t eat in a lot of the ways that are going to make you fat.

Q.

I remember reading in “In Defense of Food” about the role of tradition and culture in healthful eating. Can you tell me more about that?

A.

One of the things I’m trying to do in both projects is question the premise that science is the only source of authority we have on matters having to do with food in our bodies. Long before nutrition science, we had something called culture that guided us on the same questions. People have been dealing with health long before there was science, certainly before nutrition science. We’re constantly reading about scientific studies that support old wives’ tales.

There is a line I got from grandmothers, both Jewish and Italian, it might be my favorite rule: “The whiter the bread, the sooner you’ll be dead.” There was an understanding that white flour may not be good for you, and whole grain might be better long before the current research on whole grains. I’m trying to resurrect that cultural wisdom. This book is full of the wisdom of the grandmothers. But it takes some work. There is also some nonsense. There are old wives’ tales that are nothing but old wives’ tales.

Q.

What were some of the rejects?

A.

“Don’t eat anything bigger than your head” is a funny line. But is that really true? You could eat a melon and you’d be fine. My favorite one that we got was, “Only one meat per pizza.” I thought that was wonderful. Talk about someone deciding to curb their excess at the last possible second. We got a ton that were funny and playful and not necessarily good health advice.

Q.

Do you have any favorite rules besides the grandmother rule you mentioned earlier?

A.

“Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself.” That gets at a lot of our issues. I love French fries, and I also know if I ate French fries every day it would not be a good thing. One of our problems is that foods that are labor or money intensive have gotten very cheap and easy to procure. French fries are a great example. They are a tremendous pain to make. Wash the potatoes, fry potatoes, get rid of the oil, clean up the mess. If you made them yourself you’d have them about once a month, and that’s probably about right. The fact that labor has been removed from special occasion food has made us treat it as everyday food. One way to curb that and still enjoy those foods is to make them. Try to make your own Twinkie. I don’t even know if you can. I imagine it would be pretty difficult. How do you get the cream in there?

Q.

Tell me about some of the other rules.

A.

Some of these rules require absolutely no explanation. “If it came from a plant, eat it. If it was made in a plant, don’t.” “It’s not food if it’s served through the window of your car.” “It’s not food if it’s called by the same name in every language.” Think Big Mac, Cheetos or Pringles. Another one I like, “The banquet is in the first bite.” Economists call this the law of diminishing marginal utility. When you realize the real pleasure in food comes in the first couple bites, and it diminishes thereafter, that’s a kind of reminder to focus on the experience, enjoy those first bites, and as you get into the 20th bite, you’re talking calories and not pleasure. I think there’s a lot of wisdom in that.

Q.

Did you learn anything new yourself from the rules?

A.

What I learned the most about wasn’t so much about nutrition. I learned a lot from hearing from readers and other people who sent things in about the psychology of food. The games we play with ourselves about food, about how we confuse lots of food with lots of food experience. They’re not the same thing. You can have intense food experience with less food. Europeans have intense food experiences but eat less food. The biggest lesson I got from this is from people sharing their tricks, their psychological games and deepest feelings about food. The psychology of food is fascinating and barely understood.

I’ve read “Omnivore’s Dilemma” and am a huge fan of Michael Pollan. But I’m also one of those meat and plant eaters who is frustrated by the “mostly plants” part of his dictum, which may work for younger people with appropriate genes and life histories, but which is equally inappropriate for many other people whose bodies must use primarily fats for energy.

I wish Mr. Pollan would more clearly differentiate between the nutritional aspects of meat consumption and the environmental aspects of the current methods in which it is produced; if he knows of any valid nutritional science which contradicts the meat eating logic of our multi-million year evolution, he should lay it out. I would love to know if Mr. Pollan has a considered critique to offer of the science and conclusions in Gary Taubes’ book “Good Calories Bad Calories?”, and/or if he broadly agrees. (As Mr. Pollan surely knows, that science is generally in accord with what our grandparents and cultural wisdom knew, up until Ancel Keys et. al. hijacked nutritional “science” 60 years ago.)

I loved reading in “Omnivore’s Dilemma” about Joel Salatin, the Virginia “grass farmer” and his sustainable grass/cattle/pig/poultry cycle. I hope that this is the future direction of land-based meat production and that analogous methods can be found for raising fish.

I’m going out today to buy the book. The catchy rules are the most fun to remember, too. One of my favorite aphorisms about how to eat is, “Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, dinner like pauper.” Through it I understood why many years ago on a trip to my good friend’s ancestral home in rural Ireland, we were served a small bit of cheese, a small slice of ham, and piece of homemade bread for evening supper. They were healthy folk. CL

Rules about food and eating cannot be understood or followed in isolation. They must cohere with more general rules about life and living. Following these “food rules” necessarily involves investing more personal labor in the growth, procurement, preparation and aftermath cleanup of food and our experience of it. Bottom line is, you cannot be lazy if you want to eat well.

The King Arthur Flour blog has other snack cake recipes as well, and it’s true–this is a LOT more work than plucking one off the shelf, but probably much tastier! The real enjoyment would definitely be in the first few bites, especially if you can remember eating the fake ones.

Great interview and an interesting concept. Along with the little understood complexities of nutrition, the subject of synergy was not mentioned. I know that with the fight against HIV, the common cold, and aging, many scientists are beginning to explore combinations of chemicals in different states. My hunch is that this is folklore provides the most usual clues to human health, namely in food interactions. Could you tell us more about this cutting-edge subject?

I just finished reading the China Study. It was recommended to me by my yoga teacher. I was completely unprepared for the contents of the book. Beyond the research that destroyed any thought of the government helping the public be healthier, I just was not ready for the Vegan-or-nothing message.

Pollan, I found to be more in tune with what I’ve felt all along. I listen to my body, and it tells me that meat and dairy are notwhat I want. I still have cheese (mmmm….brie) now and then and I think that’s a message he gives convincingly. Be sensible.

On the psychology of food…..jeez. I was just talking to my mother about the headache it is when I attend company meetings where lunch is provided. I always bring my own lunch since I don’t feel like eating greasy pizza. ( I love homemade pizza) And simply by my actions I get comments from co-worker after co-worker about “oh, that’s why you’re so skinny…you can avoid pizza” or ” Don’t like pizza?” and my favorite “Come on, have a slice…calories don’t count at meetings.” Based only on my behavior, my co-workers think I’m judging them because I make different choices than they do. Mealtime is so emotionally loaded, good and bad. I’m nurturing my body with food I love and somehow manage to make other people feel bad about themselves for no reason other than their own internal thoughts on food.

The amount of calories in the Elizabethan English diet due to alcohol is absolutely staggering – I couldn’t find an online source, but vaguely recall that for some sustained periods across a wide swath of social classes it could approach 20% of daily caloric intake. Small beer for breakfast, cider and ale throughout the day. Beer and distilled spirits are a good way to purify water and store grain calories in a stable format for the future. And if you were in the Royal Navy, the ration established by regulations in 1756 at a half pint, 8 ounces, of rum. Straight for the petty officers, or diluted into 3 cups of grog with water. “Up Spirits!”

Can you imagine a modern diet with 8 ounces of full proof rum a day? I suppose it’s a good thing they finally cancelled the rum ration on British ships, including aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines… in 1970!

Nick @ 3; homo-sapiens didn’t evolve with a meat-eating diet; nor did we evolve because we ate meat. We evolved as scavengers with a digestive system capable of consuming the highest-quality (nutritional) parts of plants, mainly grains and legumes. We discovered the added benefits of scavenging marrow and brains from fallen carrion. Certainly, eating meat solves a lot of time constraint problems when it comes to feeding and fueling our bodies. It can also be done in more sustainable and environmentally sensitive ways. But don’t perpetuate the myth that eating meat is what we’re meant to do. Heart disease is the #1 killer in America for a reason, and if every person on the planet consumed as much meat as the average American or European, all that livestock would devastate the natural environment, even if it was ALL grass-fed.

People whose bodies are functioning relatively well don’t need to be told to drink when they are thirsty.

Likewise, if you regain – or have not lost – your native intuition regarding your nutritional needs, you will “know” what you should eat.

The body is capable of exquisite balancing, and it directs us with very clear signals to take care of its requirements.

However, when the body has been given real extremes of food over long periods, or even a lifetime, it becomes tough to balance smoothly, and one winds up not only losing one’s balance, but also one’s intuitive internal compass.

***
It’s interesting that native peoples around the world managed to incorporate whole grains and beans into their diets (rice and beans, corn and beans etc.) They had no intellectual idea that the rice and beans complemented each other and yielded complete protein, but their bodies knew, and they developed cooking and techniques and entire cultures around this knowledge.
*****

Modern commercial food – both fast and slow – is aimed at making profit through sensory addiction. To continue to make a buck in these industries, these businesses need to make an addict. Addict them to sugar, to fat, to salt, artificial flavors, etc., etc.

(Even your common barkeep knows how this works – put salty peanuts, chips, pickles at the bar. The customer eats salt and then wants a beer to get rid of the excess, and then wants more salt, and then more beer….etc.)

But not only do they make their customers addicts who lose their health over time, they also effectively make their customers stupid. Stupid in the sense that they no longer have their native, brilliant intelligence about food and about their bodies.

(Ever watch a real youngster, face red, tears streaming, crying unconsolably and uncontrollably for candy…addicted to junk food and screaming for another fix?)

This, in large measure, is the genesis of our current health care crisis.

In my opinion, those who perpetuate this situation – through ignorance, greed and indifference, are, in a very real sense, commiting crimes against humanity.

***
By the way, sugars are found in plants. Best to get them while eating whole foods, not as an extract from the plants. The commercial food interests have found a way to clothe themselves in verbiage that makes it look like they are changing their stripes, but they have simply changed the name of their ingredients…..sugar is now disguised as evaporated cane juice, or agave syrup, or any of a large number of other subterfuges are used to disguise the fact that the same shell game is being played.

Especially now that most of the original natural food companies that came out of the 60’s and 70’s (with missionary zeal), have been purchased by the likes of Kelloggs, and other food giants who have been dictating the nation’s poor food habits hand in hand with the huge agribusiness interests.

I think there is too much nostalgia for “the old days” and “grandma’s wisdom.” My great grandmother and grandmother’s generation (immigrant and 1st generation Italian) were overwhelmingly morbidly obese, and there wasn’t a processed food in the house back then. But butter and olive oil were plentiful. My grandmother could not cook a vegetable without then drowning it in olive oil. Her mother died from kidney failure due to unmanaged type II diabetes. Perhaps in a reaction to the deprivation of the lives they left in the old country, or the Great Depression, overindulgence was the rule of the day. Fat children were healthy children. If you read cook books from the 1800s everything is butter, butter, butter and very little vegetable. The “meat and potatoes” diet of the 40’s and 50’s would make most nutritionists blanche today. I don’t deny that there is a problem with our food supply and the way we eat, but food isn’t the only thing that has changed. We sit at desks 8-12 hours a day. We have appliances that remove the physical labor from make most tasks. And we have a society where time is of such importance that the idea of taking more time to do many of these tasks, walk to work, do laundry by hand, is laughable.

I imagine this will be a great read, but food isn’t the only component of the healthy living equation. That said, knowledge helps us find the right path to a long and healthy life… anything is worth a read in the greater context of defining the lifestyle that helps us individually live “right”.

I find a combination of balanced diet, exercise, and a community of healthy supporters keeps me going when I would rather make excuses to eat fast food and watch TV :)

I love the line “eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself”. My husband and I have really gotten into growing our own vegetables in our PNW urban yard. When shopping for seeds we’re always game for trying to grow something we would never buy at the grocery store.

My biggest surprise is that while we’ve gotten really good at growing, we don’t really know how to cook a lot of the vegetables that grow well in our region.

We’ve had super successful harvests of beets, cabbage, kohlrabi, kale, squash, and turnips. These are things that our parents never cooked, we’d never buy or order in a restaurant. So, we’ve found that we’ve been buying cookbooks of northern latitude cultures- german and russian. Our parents just happen to be of german and russian descent, but they lost the connection to the ancestral food (except for a love of potatoes.) We’ve been trying to connect back to our great grandparents food instead of eating tacos and spaghetti all the time.

I like the direction Mr. Pollan’s work has been going and I think a lot of his ideas are rock solid. I would love to see him in a czar or policy role in government.

But I quibble with his shameful propagation of myths about the relationship between evolution and technology. There is a reason why I am taller than my father and he is taller than his father, who was raised in a farming village. It is because our diets now are better than they were before. Ancient humans weren’t healthy, hearty vikings; they were weak, sickly, malnourished scavengers (the role source of our tepid meat-digestion enzymes, not innate hunting abilities as Pollan and others have suggested) just barely getting by. Our bodies now would be unrecognizable to our ancestors, and the reason is technology.

Technological advances in farming and, yes, diets have improved health. Going back to “primitive” diets (Go “paleo,” for $39.95) is not the answer.

I follow Michael as much as possible; however, my budget and family’s likes keep me from going whole-hog (or whole-tomato).

So i do a 2/3 split. I make my own breakfast/lunch and just relax about dinner. Its made it easier for me to maintain and lose weight plus I don’t seem like a holier-than-thou drone (who wants to eat with that?).

Oh okay, sure. Junk food may appear but follow this rule and you’ll be okay. Only half. Eat half of the junky food you’re served and you’ll be okay.

Good FAGE in the morning with literally flush out any bad choices the day before.